Dear diary,
I woke thinking about worth. What’s the worth of this blog that I’m keeping here? What does it offer that a reader couldn’t find anyplace else? I suggest nothing: I suggest that everything I say here can be found elsewhere, stated better. Nevertheless I do believe that this blog has worth, because it contains thot, and thot itself is inherently valuable. Or maybe not valuable but of interest, at least to me. And this blog is a place where thot is always moving around. So that’s the purpose of my blog and also its worth. You want water, go find a river; you want a whirlpool of thot, take a dip in Bryan’s blog, mister physician. Then send a cock to Asclepius.
Also I was thinking about the worth of tradition, and wondering whether it might be better to pay attention to it or ignore it. What I mean is this: I have friends who claim they like art, but none of them care for the English Romantic Poets: they say those writers are too ancient; whereas these friends of mine are only interested in the new, contemporary, rule-defying stuff like Surrealism. Now I love Surrealism, but I also love the English Romantic Poets. I love modern art, but I also love the geniuses who are seen by us contemporaries as traditional, for I believe that any tradition is just a collection of artists who defied the rules of their day so effectively that the ages of artists who followed in their wake imitated their style until its rule-breaking nature began to look like a rule of its own.
And if you break from tradition, what happens? Readers read you and adore your fresh, bold newness. OK, now what? Those readers become writers in their turn, and your style becomes a guide to them. Thus your success as an idiosyncratic rule-breaker made you into the exemplar of yet another tradition.
Tradition is thus unavoidable; for the only other outcome available is indifference. If you write in a way that people don’t like, they don’t read you. Tradition & indifference are the Scylla & Charybdis of art.
Who wants indifference? This is why I say: with success comes a new tradition, therefore I’m interested in the greatest traditions of the past, and if possible I would uncover the ultradition (ultra tradition) that over-arches ALL of art. I don’t know if such a thing exists — I suspect, were we to find it, it would resemble epidemic hysteria, mass delusion or hypnosis, or at least collective persuasion; because the notion of tradition is a narrative that one must believe in, and the validity of each, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Also I’m conflicted about the value of the unity of superpowers — perhaps it’s better to remain separate yet harmonious. Tho I’m firmly against indifference, either despite the fact or because that’s all I’ve achieved.
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The note-to-self that I tried to flesh out in the above, just for the record, was worded exactly like so (I scribbled it on a paper on my bedside table in the middle of the night):
Sticking to tradition vs. breaking w/tradition — doomed to repeat cycle OR no one listens.Now I ask myself: Did I do a good job clarifying this in the preceding paragraph? And I answer myself: Not really, but don’t bother fixing it: just go ahead and leave it; it’s a tedious topic anyway.
*
Lastly I was wondering about the relation of philosophy to imaginative literature; because I was thinking about the pre-Socratic philosophers, and how that label anoints Socrates as the great turning point — I was wondering why this is, and my first thot was:
Well Socrates had Plato to tell his stories, to write all those dialogues and multi-party exchanges (yes I know it was not just Plato who wrote of him, but let my frail thots dally with false surmise); perhaps Socrates’ philosophy, if he had one, wasn’t actually worth more than the philosophy of Herakleitos or Diogenes, but those geniuses lacked a student like Plato to embellish and dramatize their sayings.
Could we say that Herakleitos and Diogenes are more like lyric poets when compared to Plato’s Socrates, who is more like a character in a play or novel; and that’s why the latter is more popular? No, I think we’re going too far to say such a thing — even entertaining the possibility of speaking like this makes me start to feel scared: I feel as tho we’re in a ship that’s heading out into the ocean, leaving the land, and the land is Truth, so Truth is receding into the distance now, till all we can see in every direction surrounding us is the same horizon of water, and the depths of the ocean is the dreamworld of the subconscious; it’s like we’re surrounded by materia poetica but we’re too timid to try to compose our own poem.
But seriously, how much does it enhance the persuasiveness or the worth of the philosophical ideas of, say, Arthur Schopenhauer, that, aesthetically speaking, he was a very good writer. David Hume, Søren Kierkegaard: likewise topnotch. (But so were Herakleitos and Diogenes; so why the disproportionate renown of Plato’s Socrates? I think I implied the answer to that above, when I didn’t dare state that the present generation of vipers values narrative over lyric.) And to a certain extent, because I value clarity when pioneering into the beyond, I’d add the notebooks of Wittgenstein to our list here; tho I’m aware that I’m fonder of fragmentariness than others, and I never mind when a work remains unfinished: I almost prefer it, for I esteem the act of spark-shooting toward further potential over the state of having concluded.
And then there’s Nietzsche, and the question: philosopher or fill-in-the-blank? I say: who cares what you label him, he’s still my favorite.
CODA
Can distinguished writing be separated from distinguished thinking, or are these things one and the same? I suspect the truth lies in the latter; and I’m an intense admirer of falsehood, which is why I write this way.
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